Earl Sweatshirt and Rap’s Murky In-Between Generation

At twenty-four, the jaded Odd Future alum is a symbol of how quickly the industry moves, and an example of how a young star can evolve.

As an artist, Earl Sweatshirt is propelled by his own psyche. He has always seemed to view success as both a cause for celebration and a burden.

Photograph by Awol Erizku for The New Yorker

Alongside video games, popular music is at the top of the list of America’s most reliable sources of moral panic. Half a century after Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips stoked mass hysteria, Odd Future, a blustering group of young California rappers and skaters, stirred concern and excitement in equal measure. On their early singles, which became hits about a decade ago, the members rapped nimbly and ferociously about subjects meant to shock and offend: gross-out body horror, casual homophobia and misogyny, and violent sexual acts, to name a few. Their rallying cry was all mischief, and probably not sincere: “Kill people! Burn shit! Fuck school!” By 2010, the leader of Odd Future was a nineteen-year-old named Tyler, the Creator, but the most captivating member was a sixteen-year-old who called himself Earl Sweatshirt. He was impossible to look away from, because he was so baby-faced, and impossible to stop listening to, because of the mastery with which he rapped about unsettling subjects.

Today, Earl Sweatshirt is a symbol of how quickly rap moves, and also an example of how a young rap star can evolve. At twenty-four, an age when most people are just starting a career and beginning to dabble in self-discovery, Earl is an elder statesman of hip-hop. In his raps and on social media, he comes across as a weathered and jaded old man rather than as an excitable youth. After Odd Future rose to fame, Earl Sweatshirt abruptly disappeared. He was enrolled in a strict all-boys program in Samoa by his mother, who wished to shelter him from the risks inherent to teen-age stardom. In absentia, he grew into a legend. When he returned, he focussed on his solo work, recording two albums (“Doris,” from 2013, and “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside,” from 2015) that were difficult to absorb, not because they were gruesome but because they were stylistically abstruse and emotionally raw. He’d morphed from a firecracker into a weary person grappling with depression and isolation, stubbornly resisting the temptations of mainstream rap. Teen-age revolt yielded to precarious mental health; daredevil experimentation with drugs in staged videos yielded to lyrics about self-medication.

Earl Sweatshirt’s new album, “Some Rap Songs,” offers listeners no easy inroads. Ambling and drowsy, the record finds Earl drained of—or perhaps relieved of—the urgency and belligerence that characterized his early music and drew comparisons to Eminem and the Wu-Tang Clan. On “I Don’t Like Shit,” Earl wrestled with the death of his grandmother and the dissolution of a romance. On this record, he has a more complex loss to sort through: the death of his father, the South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, from whom he was estranged. Kgositsile died in January, shortly before Earl was meant to reunite with him in South Africa. The gravity of this unfinished business left Earl in a state of pronounced introspection. “Not getting to have that moment left me to figure out a lot with my damn self,” he wrote in a press release when announcing the new record.

But “Some Rap Songs” does not document any sort of resolution. Instead, it languishes in the hazy confusion of Earl’s circumstances. In this, the album recalls the gauzy and meandering work of the cult rap hero MF Doom more than anything by the bellicose stars he was once compared to. The songs are brief, ornamented with subtle bits of spoken word and patchwork soul samples that add moments of levity and warmth. As always, Earl’s words tumble out of him, and the lines progress like dominoes, falling over in sluggish but steady succession.

For such a dexterous rapper, Earl is doggedly resistant to confronting matters head on. His voice is often buried in the production’s swirling, fragmentary fog, and his words frequently trail off. The microphone catches ambient noise, as though Earl were rapping from far away. There is a feeling of gentle voyeurism when listening to this album—it often seems as if a third party had switched on the tape midway through a verse, hoping to capture a spurt of profundity or confession, without the rapper’s permission. Yet many of the songs were self-produced, or made with the help of musician friends, like Standing on the Corner, a New York collective that makes genre-defying beats. The liner notes, where professional recording studios are typically listed, simply read, “Recorded and Mixed at home.”

Anyone hoping for a window into the reality of Earl’s quest will be disappointed. “Peanut,” the song that deals with his father’s death most explicitly, is also one of the album’s least legible tracks. It sounds as if Earl is on a surgical table, slowly succumbing to a thick blanket of anesthesia. “Bless my pops / She sent him off and not an hour late / Still in shock and now my heart out somewhere on the range / Out of range,” he says. His voice grows slurry and halting: “Like we making food / Father’s face but I’m not afraid / My uncle Hugh”—the song ends abruptly.

Maybe those early Odd Future recordings represented a kind of test, weeding out listeners who were too easily perturbed, too narrow-minded, or too impatient to listen closely. These new songs are meant to be experienced privately—enjoyed, at best; endured, at worst—with plenty of time to read lyrics from which clarity might never emerge.

“I’m a surviving child star,” Earl writes in the record’s press release. It’s an optimistic assertion, but one that hints at the hazards of the kind of rapid ascent he experienced. His early success was a harbinger of industry trends: the young Earl Sweatshirt would not be out of place in the current rap landscape, which is increasingly dominated by brash young men who have developed huge fan bases online and thrashed their way onto a mainstream stage.

Many of today’s biggest stars began their careers as Earl did, crafting raw, unruly personas on social media and releasing confrontational music that is equal parts punk and rap. But, while Odd Future’s early work now seems like pure fantasy, the rebellion of today’s preëminent young rappers has become reality, in often troubling ways. Tekashi 6ix9ine first gained attention with a pugnacious and gritty New York street-rap sound, along with his rainbow-colored hair and his dozens of tattoos of the number 69. Last month, he landed in federal prison on charges of gang activity and racketeering. (He has pleaded not guilty.) The cartoonishly puerile Lil Pump and the Texas outlaw Tay-K have faced drug problems and serious prison time, respectively. (Tay-K has denied the charges against him.) XXXTentacion and Lil Peep, two artists who used their considerable songwriting chops to fuse hip-hop swagger and emo-rock melodies, both died recently. The contrast between the new wave of talent and Earl Sweatshirt, once a figurehead of a youth rap movement, is stark. The work of a young man quietly analyzing his father’s death over some loopy, meandering beats feels almost quaint. And, in retrospect, it makes the panic surrounding Odd Future feel nonsensical.

The history books of the future, if such things still exist then, will surely portray 2018 as a moment of major change in popular music, particularly in rap. Formerly indomitable figures have spectacularly fallen from grace: Kanye West has surrendered to his own grandiose ramblings and enthusiasms; Nicki Minaj has endured public combustion and a relatively poorly performing album; Jay-Z has fully evolved from gangster-rap superstar to domesticated soon-to-be billionaire, seeming to succeed only as an accessory to his wife, Beyoncé. Now, in desperation, some of these stars are turning to their renegade younger peers for salvation. Minaj’s only hit of the year came by way of collaboration with Tekashi 6ix9ine. Lil Pump temporarily revived West’s sputtering run this summer with a naughty duet called “I Love It.” This fall, West invited Pump to perform the single on “Saturday Night Live,” where both dressed up in giant water-bottle costumes. In October, the esteemed Atlanta rapper Future released a mixtape with a lyrically melodramatic newcomer and chart-topper named Juice WRLD, surely in part to gain streams. The power has dramatically shifted into the hands of untested artists with immense commercial potential and poor impulse control. They have little time for introspection or self-preservation, but their imperative to make art may be a saving grace.

Earl Sweatshirt and many of his Odd Future colleagues, including Tyler, Frank Ocean, and Syd, are somewhere in the murky generational in-between, aged beyond their years but forging onward. These artists, particularly Earl, have been able to cut a path of self-discovery. This has not solved all of Earl’s problems, as anyone who’s listened to “Some Rap Songs” can attest. He has always seemed to view success as both a cause for celebration and a burden. In this sense, he is an artist, propelled by his own psyche rather than by the charts or the Internet. For those thrust into the limelight today, there may not be much of a distinction between the two. They can feed the industry machine, or perish. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the December 10, 2018, issue, with the headline “Generation In-Between.”

Carrie Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015, and became a staff writer in 2018.

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